Getting both the touchpad and an external mouse to play nicely together can be tricky. If you use the <tt>evdev</tt> driver then you don't have to specify the ButtonMapping, however, I've had better luck using the regular <tt>mouse</tt> driver. This particular setup specifies a Logitech MX400 USB mouse along with setting up the Alps touchpad. (For more complete instructions see [http://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Get_All_Mouse_Buttons_Working here].)

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Getting both the touchpad and an external mouse to play nicely together can be tricky. If you use the <tt>evdev</tt> driver then you don't have to specify the ButtonMapping, however, I've had better luck using the regular <tt>mouse</tt> driver. This particular setup specifies a Logitech MX400 USB mouse as the core pointer and Alps touchpad as a secondary device. (For more complete instructions see [http://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Get_All_Mouse_Buttons_Working here].)

Installing Arch on a Dell Latitude D600

The d600 was a released by Dell on 3/12/03. At the time of its release it was met with great reviews. Despite being almost 5 years old this business laptop is perfectly capable of delivering a satisfying Linux experience.

Introduction

This is not a guide on how to install Arch (for help with that see the installation guide), but rather an attempt to cover the steps of how to take full advantage of the laptop's hardware. Despite being an Arch-wiki page, everything explained here should apply to other Linux distributions as well.

Getting most of the hardware to work correctly under Linux, is not overly difficult (in fact these days most things are auto-detected, and "just work"TM. Keep in mind I am by no means an expert of hardware in Linux so you may find better solutions than the ones presented here. If you do please edit this guide so that other people may benefit as well.

Documentation

As always the documentation for a Dell laptop is almost non-existant. The only documentation you are going to find for the d600 is the spec sheet and some useless pdf files (although the service guide can be useful if you need to take the laptop apart for some reason). So with that being said the only way to find out useful information is to inspect each individual hardware component.

Pre-Installation

Bios Update

Now before you delete the Windows partition, you'll want to update the bios to the newest version (rev. A16 as of this writing), to avoid any potential non-OS hardware related problems. Grab the executable and install it.

Post Installation

PC Speaker

The first thing to do is to disable that annoying PC speaker, for our current session.
Template:Box Command

Make a User

If you forgot to make a user now is the time to do so. Arch comes equipped with adduser which is a nice command line interface for useradd. So use that. When prompted for Initial group you should most likely take the default of users. For Additional groupslp,wheel,network,video,audio,optical,floppy,storage,camera will probably cover most everything. You can always add a user to a group later via:

# gpasswd -a USERNAME DESIRED_GROUP

Compiling from Source

Chances are you'll probably want to setup ABS so that you can use the AUR. (For more complete instructions see the appropriate wikis.) Edit Template:Filenameto your liking, and then setup the ABS tree via:

(Information taken shamelessly from here).
Most of the information isn't critical although some of it is interesting, so here it is for the curious. (If you are going to do a lot of your own package building and want to know more about optimization, then you may be interested in Template:Filename

processor

Linux's denotation of what processor is being used.

vendorID

The vendor of your processor. Intel/AMD/Cyrix/etc.

CPU family

Indexed indication of your processor's architecture.

model

???

model name

English language string specifying what CPU your computer has.

stepping

CPU revision number (more or less).

cpu MHz

Speed of CPU.

cache size

Amount of cache your CPU has.

*_bug

Tells whether or not your CPU is susceptible to some well known processor bugs.

Wireless

The D600 comes with either an Intel Pro Wireless 2200 or a Broadcom BCM43xx. The BCM43xx can be quite fickle under Linux, however the Intel Pro Wireless works flawlessly and is trivial to install. As the driver is already included in the kernel the only thing that needs to be done is to install the firmware.

# pacman -S ipw2200-fw

Now add the entry ipw2200 in the modules section of Template:Filename, and add/change the line NET_PROFILES=(main). Now make a main network-profile in Template:Filenamefollowing the template in that directory. It will look something like the following.

CPU Scaling

Frame Buffer

Todo

Kernel

The pre-compiled Arch kernel certainly works, however, it has a lot of bloat so you'll probably want to compile your own. It's possible to make a custom kernel via ABS, however, building a kernel manually is just as easy. Grab the source from kernel.org and extract it to Template:Filename. Make a simlink (ln -s /usr/src/linux /usr/src/kernel-folder) and then make menuconfig.

(NOTE: You probably need to install make (for obvious reasons) and diffutils or you will probably get the following error message.)

Aside: The kernel line processor.max_cstate=2 disables the CPU from going into the 2 higher power saving states. While this causes the battery to use several hundred more mW of power it also disables the annoying CPU wine that is usually very noticeable. (This problem also exists in Windows.) It seems that the kernel module usb-uhci is partially related to this problem. Disabling this is an option but it will disables USB support...

Xorg

With the constant stream of updates, and TONS of outdated documentation on the web, Xorg can be a pain to configure.

Video Card

Use the open source "xf86-video-ati" radeon driver. ATI dropped support for the Radeon (RV250) Mobility FireGL 9000 after catalyst driver version 8.28.8. The binary and the userspace tools are available in the AUR, however they WILL NOT load with Xorg >= 7.2.

Note: Don't specify AGPFastWrite or AccelMethod in the xorg.conf Device section as it will cause X not to start.

Fonts

To make your fonts look better you can follow the wiki directions here and/or here and install cairo-lcd and libxft-lcd. Personally I don't think those packages look nearly as good as Fedora's, so I use those. Get rpmextract from pacman and then download the packages. Extract the .so files and copy them into /usr/lib. (IMPORTANT! Copying over the old files may crash your current X-session, so it's best to do this from a console.)

Dual Monitors

Setting up dual monitors used to be an insanely frustrating ordeal because you would have to edit xorg.conf and then start/test/reset X. Luckily RandR fixes this. To summarize from here and here "RandR 1.2 provides automatic discovery of modes (resolutions, refresh rates, etc.) coupled with the ability to configure outputs dynamically (resize, rotate, move, etc.)." The only thing required by the user is to specify a virtual display area, and run the appropriate xrandr command. (For a nice tutorial see here.

Notes

Xinerama is deprecated and will cause X to segfault. This is a known regression by the X developers and they have no intention of fixing it as Xinerama was basically a hack anyways.

MergedFB has now been completely replaced by RandR.

This particular setup uses an external 20" LCD running at 1680x1050 and is connected to a docking station via a DVI cable. Now, it would be useful if the external monitor was auto detected and configured whenever we started the computer. Now because the computer is a laptop we also don't want to try and configure the screen if it isn't connected. The following bash script will do just that.

Mice

Getting both the touchpad and an external mouse to play nicely together can be tricky. If you use the evdev driver then you don't have to specify the ButtonMapping, however, I've had better luck using the regular mouse driver. This particular setup specifies a Logitech MX400 USB mouse as the core pointer and Alps touchpad as a secondary device. (For more complete instructions see here.)